NEWS
1. Milk prices
We were told last fall that increases to milk prices were coming. But, as Jennifer Henderson reports, the increase in the retail price far exceeds the increase meant to offset costs for dairy farmers:
The Canadian Dairy Commission warned consumers last fall a price increase would take effect in February, reflecting a 2.2% increase for dairy farmers to compensate for higher fertilizer and fuel prices. The Dairy Commission said that works out to less than two-cents a litre for consumers; $0.0174 to be exact.
But in Nova Scotia the price increase for milk sold in several stores appears to be as much as 15-cents a litre higher, or seven times more than the jump at the farm gate. The sticker-shock is noticeable, even in a period of high food inflation.
Let’s do some comparison shopping. Prior to the price hike last week, you could buy four litres of 3.25% (whole milk) for $6.29 at Shoppers Drug on Wyse Road. It’s now $6.88 for four litres, up 59 cents.
But that’s a bargain compared to paying $7.38 for the same 4L jug of milk at the Sobeys store just down the street.
Henderson looks at prices at different chains and across the country and asks, “are we being milked?”
Click here to read “Milk prices sour on consumers.”
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2. Convention Centre party celebrates Touquoy mine ‘completion’
This is the worst centrepiece I’ve seen besides the Super Bowl Sunday chopped liver football in one of my mother’s 1970s cookbooks. It’s also the starting point for Joan Baxter’s latest article:
The caption for the three photos posted on Facebook by a community engagement officer for St Barbara Ltd says: “Nice evening in Halifax! Last blast party for my work and some quality time with my valentine.” Her words are followed by a flourish of red heart emojis.
Must have been quite the party.
The Facebook photos show tempting plates of fresh oysters, a large hall full of tables decked out for a banquet with large golden stars suspended over them, and a close-up of a table decorated with a miniature replica of the open pit at St Barbara’s Touquoy gold mine in Moose River, replete with little toy earth movers and bulldozers and trucks, what looks like a dangling piece of golden foil, and lettering announcing “Feb 2023: Touquoy mine complete.”
St Barbara may be celebrating, but Nova Scotians won’t be feeling quite so festive about the legacy of the mine, Baxter says.
Click here to read “As Touquoy mine operation closes, company celebrates.”
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3. Amherst hospital will continue to use makeshift emergency department
This item is written by Jennifer Henderson
The main emergency department at the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre in Amherst was scheduled to re-open today, according to a news release issued by Nova Scotia Health on Jan. 20, three weeks after a 37-year-old woman died after waiting at the hospital nearly eight hours to see a doctor.
The makeshift emergency department — which has been running since a flood in May 2022 damaged the actual emergency department — will continue to operate for the foreseeable future.
News that the original Cumberland emergency department would not re-open this week came in a news release issued by Nova Scotia Health late Friday afternoon to those on the mailing list of the Northern health zone. Here is the explanation provided in that release.
The emergency department at Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre (CRHCC) in Amherst will continue to operate from a temporary location within the hospital due to unexpected renovation delays. Despite Nova Scotia Health’s best efforts and full support of Facilities Management and Support, our teams, suppliers and contractors, the opening will be delayed due to a COVID-19 outbreak among the specialized team responsible for completing the renovation.
Nova Scotia Health remains committed to completing this project as quickly as possible and will share more information around timelines when available.
Nova Scotia Health apologizes to all patients and families affected by this situation. Patient concerns arising from the service interruption that require follow up are asked to contact the patient relations line by calling toll-free 1-844-884-4177 or by emailing patientfeedback@nshealth.ca”.
Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, the Independent MLA who represents Cumberland North where the Amherst hospital is located, has been unable to find out when the renovated emergency department will be ready.
“I requested a copy of the project timeline last month,” said Smith-McCrossin in a newsletter to her constituents, “but it still needs to be provided. I have spoken with many people about this and there is a general disappointment.”
“We have provided the government with a 16-point action plan, and ‘urgently completing the CRHCC Emergency Room is #2.’ A spotlight was placed on Cumberland Regional when Ali Holthoff died tragically after going to the ER seeking medical help while suffering from abdominal pain.”
The MLA for Cumberland North said how this project has been managed ought to be investigated and “reasons provided for the continued delay.”
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4. The library’s budget woes have nothing to do with buying from Amazon
On Feb. 10, The Coast published a story by Matt Stickland on the city budget. This paragraph early in the piece jumped out at me:
Back to the library. Why doesn’t Halifax Library have enough money to buy enough books? Amazon. Amazon’s monopoly of the digital book market is one of the main reasons the city doesn’t have enough money to maintain its digital collection. If Amazon had come to Halifax and had gotten the proffered tax breaks, then it would have been subsidized by our taxes while also extorting extra tax money out of us through the library budget.
Look, I am no fan of Amazon. I avoid them as much as I can, and I think the city’s bid to get them to come here was absurd. And if it had succeeded — which, to be clear, it had no chance of doing — it would have been a disaster.
But the library’s collection budget crunch is not Amazon’s fault. With a two-thirds share of the consumer market, Amazon does dominate the ebook market. But that’s the consumer market. Halifax Public Libraries get most of their ebooks through OverDrive. (The company had previously been owned by Rakuten, makers of the Kobo line of e-readers, but was purchased by private equity firm KKR in 2020.)
The library also makes ebooks available through other platforms, like its subscription to Hoopla, which also includes audiobooks, movies, and music in its collection.
I asked library spokesperson Kasia Morrison if the library ever purchases from Amazon. In terms of ebooks, the answer was straightforward: “We have never bought ebooks from Amazon.”
As for physical books, Morrison said:
On the whole, we purchase from our main vendors, which are Whitehots, Library Bound, and CVS. However, because access is most important, as a last resort, we will order from Amazon when a title is unavailable elsewhere. We buy much more from local bookstores than Amazon.
So, for once, don’t blame Amazon.
As I disclose every time I write about Halifax Public Libraries, I am a former chair of the library board, but my term ended 10 years ago and I have not been involved with the library since.
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VIEWS
1. Time capsules are stupid
A few months ago, in November, CTV ran a local story about a time capsule being opened at a local school. The capsule was filled and sealed away in a wall in 1990, when the school was being renovated. Last fall, members of the school community gathered in the gym and watched as items like a VHS tape and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures were removed from the box, along with letters from kids.
I was writing Morning File the day after this big reveal, and I was tempted to write something semi-snarky about it. A time capsule from 1990? With stuff you can pick up at Value Village? C’mon.
I refrained though, because… well, because it seemed like harmless fun. Why would I crap on people doing something so completely benign?
Time capsules are benign, and I’m sure they can be fun, but they also seem ridiculous to me.
What better way to communicate with the future than to fill a box with semi-random detritus and bury it?
You either open the time capsule within a couple of decades, in which case, big deal. Or you leave it for longer, in which case the most likely outcome is that nobody remembers it. And if you bury it, odds are whatever you’ve put in it is going to be ruined anyway.
I just finished reading James Gleick’s book Time Travel: A History, and was delighted to find he devotes a whole chapter to the stupidity of time capsules — and he also argues that the origin of the time capsule craze goes back to our old friend Tutankhamun. Americans were so smitten by the peek into the past that Tut’s tomb offered, that they took en masse to burying things to be found in the future.
But whereas Tutankhamun’s treasures included a gold mask, fine linens, golden chariots, and stunning jewelry, contemporary time capsules tend to house far more banal items. (Keep in mind that seeing Tutankhamun’s tomb as a time capsule is a projection on our part; it was never intended for us.)
Local news stories tend to treat time capsules as momentous, or messages to the future about what makes each particular time and place unique. But read enough of these stories and what seems most striking is their mind-numbing banality. What do people put in time capsules?
- National Bicentennial Tricentennial Time Capsule, Washington DC (sealed in 1975, to be opened in 2175): 7th Fleet flag, National Archives visitors’ register (I can see this, having enjoyed reading visitors’ registers at the Nova Scotia Archives myself), copies of the Washington Post and Washington Star, and letters from governors of various states about where to find their time capsules.
- Belfield, North Dakota, (sealed in 2007, to be opened in the future): letterman’s jacket, cheerleading sweater, Medora wine (I did not know there was a wine industry in the Dakotas), the US Constitution, local papers, basketball uniforms, booklets from Time, and more. All buried in a styrofoam cooler, so we’ll see how that works out.
- University of Florida, (sealed 1995): University of Florida memorabilia.
- St. Joseph Catholic Church, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, (sealed 1978): various bits of parish ephemera, local newspapers, a coin, and pictures of the building when it was under construction.
- Liberty, Mississippi (year unknown, to be opened after 40 years): letters from veterans about their military service.
- Bangor, Maine, (sealed April 30, 1999, to be opened on Oct. 20, 2046): “state-of-the-art cellular technology and local memorabilia,” says the Bangor Daily News. Memorabilia includes commemoration of University of Maine NCAA hockey championship.
- Burying copies of state and organizational constitutions seems to be very popular, too. I’m sure some university bylaws will make scintillating reading in the future. (I say this as someone who published a paper on ownership of property by Buddhist monks in medieval Sri Lanka, and who spent a lot of time reading monastic rules. I’m not saying this stuff can’t be interesting, but anyone interested is unlikely to go looking for it in time capsules.)
- Fredericksburg, Virginia, (sealed 1994, to be opened “in 50 years): Items include the brand of smokeless tobacco preferred by the governor, according to the Free-Lance Star newspaper. Refreshingly, the governor told the paper, “It’ll probably be interesting to people in 50 or 60 years, though maybe not.”
My favourite time capsule story is that of “Miss Belvedere” — a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere buried in a concrete box under Tulsa’s downtown, as part of the Tulsarama festival held that year. Placed in the glove box were the key to the car, and the contents of a typical woman’s purse, including cigarettes, bobby pins, lipstick, and tranquilizers. It was dug up, as planned, 50 years later.
The AllPar forum (“dedicated to Dodge, Jeep, Ram, Chrysler, AMC owners and enthusiasts”) has photos of Miss Belvedere emerging from its crypt.
On the Axle Addict website, writer Jason Ponic notes:
An inspection of the Belvedere revealed that the superstructure and suspension had completely rusted away. The rear springs were broken and the frame so fragile that it could barely hold its own weight.
As Gleick puts it, drily, in Time Travel: A History, “There [are] better ways to store antique cars.”
Less, drily, on the 1A Auto Parts blog, Jeremy Nutt writes:
Anyway, as it turns out, automobiles cannot be preserved by dunking them under water for 50 years. Wait….WHAT!? Yes it is true, dirty gutter water from the Tulsa streets does not preserve sheetmetal, fabric, or plastic.
In 1938, for the New York World’s Fair, Westinghouse sponsored a time capsule buried in Flushing Meadows, in Queens. It was to be opened on May 28, 8113. You can see a list of the items buried in the capsule here. They include a toothbrush, asbestos cloth, a Bible, and some neoprene. There was also a book with the modest title, The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy, Deemed Capable of Resisting the Effects of Time for Five Thousand Years, Preserving an Account of Universal Achievements, Embedded in the Grounds of the New York World’s Fair, 1939.
Good luck with that. As Gleick writes:
When the archeologists of the future come to read our legacy in the proverbial ash heap of history, they will not look to the basement crypt at Oglethorpe University [home to the “Crypt of Civilization” time capsule, established in 1936], or the time capsule buried in the mud [in] Flushing, Queens.
Oglethorpe University also served as the repository of the world’s time capsule registry, a responsibility since transferred to the International Time Capsule Society. The society shows one record for Nova Scotia: A time capsule in Chester, buried as part of a fundraiser for the Lightfoot Tower, at the Zoé Vallé Memorial Library.
If you go to the SaltWire search page and plug in “time capsule” you will find story after story after story about Maritimers burying things for people in the future. Or Maritimers opening time capsules. Or trying to figure out where an old time capsule might be.
In 2017, a school in New Waterford opened a time capsule from 1990. It included VHS tapes, magazines, catalogues, photos, and so on. Interestingly, most of the people quoted in the story talk about their memories of the school, not the objects themselves.
In 2019, workers in PEI found an 87-year-old time capsule while demolishing a former hospital. It contained newspapers, ephemera, coins, and a book. Note: archives and research libraries are better places to store books and newspapers for future reference.
In 2020, folks in Liverpool opened a time capsule from 20 years earlier. Among other things, it contained pay stubs and grocery flyers.
There is a great quote in this 2018 story about a school time capsule from the 1940s, in a North Sydney School:
“It was suggested to me that maybe Gordie Howe’s rookie card might be in here, but I don’t think,” said [former teacher and principal Alex] Gilchrist with a tremendous laugh while holding the box.
“I understand that there’s the newspaper of the day and some educational literature, or names of people — other than that I don’t know what else.”
According to the US State Department (!), “Time capsules took off in 2021”:
The number of time capsules created since the pandemic began equals the number from the previous 350 years combined, according to Adrienne Waterman, chairwoman of the International Time Capsule Society. Some individuals and families have created time capsules related to life (and in some cases the death of a loved one) during the pandemic as a cathartic gesture…
“People care about their memories. In the past, the only way they had was to pass them along in their family,” said Waterman, whose company, Not Forgotten, digitally archives people’s memories. “Technologies are evolving quickly, making archiving accessible to the average person.”
Ultimately, for all the talk of communicating with the future, time capsules are about ourselves and remembering our past. That’s why so many of them are opened while their originators are still alive. In Time Travel: A History, Gleick captures this nicely, I think:
If time capsulists are enacting reverse archeology, they are also engaging in reverse nostalgia. That feeling of sweet longing for past times — with some mental readjustment, we can feel it for our own time, without having to wait….
When people fill time capsules, they are trying to stop the clock — take stock, freeze the now, arrest the incessant head-over-heels stampede into the future.
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2. Space colonies are also stupid
In November, soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, Futurism editor Jon Christian tweeted, “Imagine living in a Mars colony with this management style.”
Musk is, of course, an enthusiast when it come to colonizing Mars. Coincidentally, he also owns a company that successfully launches rockets.
In 2016, Musk said a million humans could be living on Mars by 2060. That same year, he said humans would be landing on Mars in 2025. In 2020, he said that by 2050 he will have built 1,000 starships, launching one every three days, and that there would be a million people on Mars. Last week he said it’s “highly likely” we’ll be on Mars within 10 years, and maybe as soon as five. For good measure, he noted that “there will be a lot of jobs on Mars.”
You get the idea. Self-driving cars are just around the corner too, by the way.
All this Mars stuff got me remembering the absurd hype around Mars One. The it-was-never-going-to-happen plan to sign people up for a one-way trip to Mars. There were very serious news stories about this. Locally, we got treated to a number of stories about Tyler Reyno of Lower Sackville, NS, who made the “shortlist” of the first wave of Mars colonists.
In a December 31, 2013 Global story headlined “Lower Sackville man makes shortlist to go to Mars,” Reyno, then 20, tells reporter Julia Wong:
It’s an honour. It’s a privilege. I definitely feel like it’s where I’m meant to be. It just feels nice to be in a position to do what I love to do and what I’m passionate about.
Mars One claimed it would have an operational Mars colony by 2025. The company went bankrupt in 2019. (Shocked, I’m shocked.)
According to LinkedIn, Reyno now lives in BC, where he runs a company called Fuelsrv, which removes the “chore” of going to the gas station, by delivering fuel to you. According to a 2021 CBC story, Reyno is less interested in going to space now that he is in a long-term relationship. He says:
“Unfortunately, it did prove to be infeasible. Basically their concept, the resources, the funding, the overall goals — all of it was a little too unrealistic.”
Look, I’m an SF fan. I recently read all nine books of The Expanse, and, as you saw above (if you read the first “Views” item, I’ve also just finished a book on time travel. I’m enjoying book two of Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series. I read The Martian and Operation Hail Mary last year. I own copies of just about everything Philip K. Dick wrote.
And sure, the idea of travelling to other planets and setting up shop there is fascinating in some abstract way. So is the idea of time travel. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen anytime soon. Certainly not within the next decade.
Space colonies also offer us a kind of out. We may have fucked up the planet so badly we won’t survive as a species. But that’s OK! The richest and fittest among us will keep humanity going somewhere else. (Hmmm, that doesn’t sound so great, after all.)
I keep thinking about an essay published in Aeon last month, by Arwen E Nicholson and Raphaëlle D Haywood, entitled “There’s no planet B: The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that can support us is the one we evolved with. Here’s why.
The authors, who are both physicists and astronomers, point out that for about 90% of its history, our own planet was uninhabitable. At least for creatures like us:
The only reason we find Earth habitable now is because of the vast and diverse biosphere that has for hundreds of millions of years evolved with and shaped our planet into the home we know today. Our continued survival depends on the continuation of Earth’s present state without any nasty bumps along the way. We are complex lifeforms with complex needs. We are entirely dependent on other organisms for all our food and the very air we breathe. The collapse of Earth’s ecosystems is the collapse of our life-support systems. Replicating everything Earth offers us on another planet, on timescales of a few human lifespans, is simply impossible.
But, you say, what happens in a billion or so years, when the Sun starts to expand and it boils away the oceans? Shouldn’t we be prepping for that? Nicholson and Haywood say that’s ridiculous:
Considering how different human civilisations are today from even 5,000 years ago, worrying about a problem that humans may have to tackle in a billion years is simply absurd. It would be far simpler to go back in time and ask the ancient Egyptians to invent the internet there and then. It’s also worth considering that many of the attitudes towards space colonisation are worryingly close to the same exploitative attitudes that have led us to the climate crisis we now face.
It’s a conceit, an attempt to stave off the inevitable. We will die, our sun will die, humanity won’t last forever. No matter what you do, death awaits in Samarra.
However, it’s nice to know that if you ever make it up to the International Space Station, you can enjoy a decent espresso in a specially designed zero-g cup.
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NOTICED
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is no longer the NBA scoring leader, and he’s fine with that
LeBron James recently passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s all-time scoring leader. In his Substack newsletter (does everybody have one?) Abdul-Jabbar wrote about how that felt, in a piece called “What I Think About LeBron Breaking My NBA Scoring Record.”
First, Abdul-Jabbar says, scoring records are nice, but what’s more important is the team:
It’s also about not making scoring your obsession. Otherwise, you’re Gollum and the record is your Precious. The real goal is to win games so that you win championships because you want to please the fans who pay your salary and cheer you on game after game. Fans would rather see you win a championship than set a scoring record.
This is not a dig at LeBron James who, of course, has won many championships.
Abdul-Jabbar goes on to make this clear, in case there is any doubt:
It’s also about making sure your team gets their moments to shine and thrive and pursue their own greatness. A record is nothing if you used other players’ careers as stepping stones just for self-aggrandizement. For me, I strove to play at the highest level I could in order to be a good teammate. The points—and the record—were simply a by-product of that philosophy.
I think LeBron has the same philosophy.
So how doe Abdul-Jabbar feel? “Thrilled.” He says:
Whenever a sports record is broken—including mine—it’s a time for celebration. It means someone has pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible to a whole new level. And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more…
That is the magic of sports. To see something seemingly impossible, reminding us that if one person can do it, then we all somehow share in that achievement. It is what sends children onto playgrounds to duplicate a LeBron layup or a Steph Curry three-pointer. Or Mia Hamm inspiring a whole generation of girls to come off the bleachers and onto the field. Millions of children across the country pushing themselves toward excellence because they saw an athlete do something spectacular and they want to do it too. Or at least try. That same kind of drive is behind many of humankind’s greatest achievements.
And it’s all exceptionally glorious.
This is lovely, and it’s an important message beyond the world of professional athletics. You can be petty and jealous, or you can celebrate others’ successes with them.
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Government
City
Today
Budget Committee (Tuesday, 9:30am, City Hall) — agenda
Tomorrow
Budget Committee (Wednesday, 9:30am, City Hall) — contingency
Province
Health (Tuesday, 1pm, One Government Place) — Delivery of 4.1 Hours of Care Per Resident in Long-Term Care; with representatives from the Department of Seniors and Long-Term Care, Office of Healthcare Professionals Recruitment, Nova Scotia Nurses’ Union, and the Canadian Union of Public Employees – Nova Scotia
On campus
Dalhousie
Today
No events
Tomorrow
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine – One Year On (Wednesday, 11:30am, McMechan Auditorium, Killam Library) — Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence and the Centre for the Study of Security and Development open forum, featuring Raluca Bejan, Anders Hayden, and Lyubov Zhyznomirska, moderated by Brian Bow. Masks required, info here.
Secretoneurin is a new ovulatory hormone: evidence from studies in zebrafish (Wednesday, 2:30pm, Tupper Building, 3H1) — Vance Trudeau from the University of Ottawa will talk
Do the Right Thing(Wednesday, 6:30pm, Rooms 406 and 409, Dal Arts Centre) — screening of Spike Lee’s film, with an introductory talk by Fallen Matthews, Dalhousie University’s first Black interdisciplinary doctorate candidate in Cinema and Media Studies
You Can’t Pour From an Empty Cup: Imp of New Parents’ Mental Health (Wednesday, 7pm, online) — Dalhousie Mini Medical School
King’s
Of Good Africans and Witch Doctors: The Entangled Story of How West African Activists Worked to Decolonize Late Colonial Film (Tuesday, 7pm, KTS Lecture Hall) — Philip Zachernuk will talk
African activists in interwar Britain had long been critics of the way British popular culture represented Africa, not least in the powerful new medium of film. But when the Colonial Office during World War Two had to recruit Africans’ help to cast a major propaganda effort masquerading as a feature film, they acquired new powers, especially to revise two cinematic figures central to colonial imagery of Africa: the evil witch doctor and the grateful “Good African.” Unusually detailed records of the film’s production story reveal their struggle to challenge and even remove these characters. The revisions achieved during this process, however, cannot be adequately explained as a story of direct resistance or as the displacement of colonial images by the Africans’ vision. Rather, the revised figures were amalgams created by the unavoidably intersecting and overlapping efforts of Black American and Caribbean artists and activists in Britain, sometimes obtuse Colonial Office officials, liberal filmmakers, and diverse West Africans. While the need to decolonize culture might be obvious, the results of decolonial efforts need to be appreciated within the entangled historical process of their creation.
In the harbour
Halifax
06:00: MOL Charisma, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Colombo, Sri Lanka
07:00: NYK Romulus, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Caucedo, Dominican Republic
08:00: Kamarina, tug, moves from anchorage to Pier 9
11:00: Seaspan Loncomilla, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Valencia, Spain
11:30: Tropic Lissette, cargo ship, sails from Pier 42 for Palm Beach, Florida
15:00: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, sails from Imperial Oil for sea
15:30: IT Intrepid, cable layer, arrives at Pier 9 from Fort Lauderdale, Florida
18:00: Kamarina sails for sea
19:30: Rt Hon Paul E Martin, bulker, sails from Gold Bond for sea
22:00: MOL Charisma sails for New York
Cape Breton
No arrivals or departures.
Footnotes
Snow in winter.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a legend for his basketball career, but what he’s done off the court is really very impressive. He’s written and publicly spoken about race and religion for decades, he co-wrote a critically acclaimed novel (“Mycroft Holmes”), he’s a trained martial artist, a legit chess enthusiast, a scholar of jazz… and he played Roger Murdock in “Airplane!” A modern Renaissance man. It’s a different era, but there are signs that LeBron is going to be a worthy successor.
I’m not sure which is more incongruous, that Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is drinking espresso in space or that she’s doing it in what appears to be a red shirt Star Trek uniform?
Anyone who has moved a lot is familiar with time capsules in the form of boxes of stuff not unpacked from the previous move but, for me, the greatest time capsules are the books on my shelves not only for their content but also for the memory of reading.